The Playtest

01 March 2020 - 9 mins read time
Tags: Games Design Personal Final Project SHMUP

This week was an interesting one as I finally reached my first major milestone which is that of a public playtest[1] of an early build of my game. My project has been worked on for about 3 weeks now non-stop and it’s been a fun experience trying to piece all of the bits together for all of the initial enemy design plans and main game mechanics. and now I’m looking forward to get some testing on it. Playtesting is something that’s absolutely crucial to good game development and any self-respecting designer will do it. Having looked into the various forms of testing available I’ve decided that for this incredibly early stage of the project I’ll just be utilising One-on-one testing, Open Discussion and Feedback Forms as they seem to be the best fits for this stage of the project. (Fullerton, T., 2008.) And so the following is a description of each form and why I feel it fits for my session.

One-on-one Testing

One on one testing is the purest and simplest form of playtest possible. It consists of you the designer having the player engage with the game in front of you whilst you either sit beside them or in a separate area monitoring them. This type of testing allows you to gauge a deeper insight into how the player is experiencing the game as you’re able to watch them and understand their emotions there and then. Of course, there are issues with this such as the player reacting incorrectly as they feel either intimidated by your or too relaxed and so their experience with the game is affected. Given its simplistic nature and also given that I am the sole developer and designer for my game a one-on-one session is more manageable for my needs and it also allows me a direct line of feedback and understanding of how players are interacting with my game. I can then take this data and use it on my project immediately.

Open Discussion

Open discussion can occur after a group test or a series of one-on-one tests with users. Here, you gather all of the testers after they have experienced the game and promote an open discussion amongst them whereby you ask questions and get them to interact and share their thoughts and feedback as a group. Again, there are issues with this. As they’re in a group some feedback could be fed by peer pressure and may not reflect people’s true feelings or some of the more introvert testers may be unwilling to share a thought that seems unpopular. Whilst this could be a drawback an open discussion would be a fantastic way for me to hear people’s thoughts on the game and get them to open up with how they feel about it and how it plays. A discussion would allow me to sit and take in the stream of feedback that the audience could provide, and it would help me increase my iteration times on my project by getting a larger amount of feedback in a shorter time frame.

Feedback Forms

Feedback forms are exactly what they describe. Here, you give each of the testers a form after having completed a session for them to fill out. This form enables them to anonymously give feedback and share their thoughts which allows them to express their true feelings and it also allows you to ask them a series of prompted questions to gather feedback in specific areas. It’s not without it’s own issues though, because it’s given as a form the feedback expressed is up to interpretation as there’s no way to clarify what they meant and you lose a certain part of the process of interaction, though that can be mitigated by combining it with other forms of playtesting. Feedback forms are a very simple way for me to collate information from participants who are either unable to play it physically for me or would be otherwise intimidated by me when playing. They’re an incredibly useful addition which would greatly widen my net of feedback amongst participants.

A Sense of Direction

With my testing methods secure the next crucial stage of playtesting is trying to figure out what it is you want to gain from it. Winn, B. & Heeter, C. 2006 state that without clarifying what the intent is behind the testing session, you’re just asking for personal opinion and bias and not nailing what it is you want to solve.

So with the playtest this week I was hoping to get a couple of things from it and to get them I drafted up a test sheet template which had some questions I wanted players to answer after they had played the demo. The plan was that they would answer the test sheet first You can view this template below:

test-sheet

On it are several questions. I carefully thought about these questions and I also read a fantastic article which taught about the FFWWDD mnemonic of testing questions. Patton S, 2017 talks about the FFWWDD mnemonic as meaning:

Frustrating Favorite Wanted Wand Doing Describe

These starting questions are designed in a way to help ascertain a player’s feelings about the game in a clear and concise fashion. It leads them down a specific route of first detailing their feelings in the game, then asking what their thoughts are on the game. I wanted to utilise this system for my first playtest as it looks like a fantastic starting point for my initial project and so the first 6 questions are from (Patton S).

Along with these I also added several more of my own questions to help get specific feedback on some key areas that I wanted to test for.

  1. Enemy Variety
    Enemy variety is a key part to any enjoyable arcade-style experience and it also allows for mixing and matching of challenge types for the player to keep them interested and challenged at their current level. So I feel it’s important I ensure that this level of variety prevalent enough for the players and so this should get me some immediate feedback on that front.

  2. Controls
    Controls are a key part of the game’s experience and I want them to feel comfortable and intuitive from the get-go. By getting players to give me feedback on the controls from the start my aims of accessibility on this front will be greatly helped and it will also allow players in later sessions to get over the control issues as they would’ve been tested to be easier to use and understand thereby saving player learning time.

  3. Movement/Density
    Movement and the density of bullets on screen are also crucial factors of the gameplay. Given more time the game would have an adjustable difficulty level but for now there will only be a “normal” difficulty. Because of this, I need to start testing the density of bullets on screen and the players ability to manoeuvre through them as early as possible to start fine tuning it.

At the time of this test the game had about 80% of it’s core mechanics and is lacking other major features such as UI, Menu, Game States and other stuff. But it was good enough to go ahead and see what people think of the initial gameplay ideas and controls. The following is a list of the stuff that I managed to finish for this weeks playtest:

And honestly the list goes on. So enough jabbering about what I’ve done, time to talk about how it went.

The Results

I conducted the playtest on a total of 5 participants on all tests and a total of 8 on various tests. It’s less than I would’ve liked but getting people to be able to playtest under all 3 forms was a lot harder than I thought and I had to rely on my class for those numbers. With that in mind, a lot of the feedback I gathered from them all was incredibly useful. Many participants found the game itself fun, albeit quite difficult. The also enjoyed the patterns and variety of enemies but disliked the enemies high health, their fast projectile speeds and the slowness of their own movement. There was also a significant struggle from players to determine when and if an enemy was even taking damage, this left many players guessing and it had them very confused. These are sentiments that were shared by a vast majority of the players and so need some serious consideration for next time.

Overall the playtest went as good as it could and I feel my research into the topic helped prepare me for a smoother and more useful session for my project overall. I look forward to the next one. See ya next time!

[1] Playtesting is the process in which a development team gathers a series of willing participants to play a game with the intent being to better understand how it plays amongst new players and if it's coming across as intended. This is different from QA Testing wherein the intent is to find problems with games.
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